Michael Avery and Mark Brodin, Staff Writers - truthout
Stephan:
The principal failing I see with Democrats is that they do not seem capable of playing a long game. The christofascist Republicans and the oligarchs who own them, in contrast, understand this strategy very well, as the recent decision on Affirmative Action reveals. This article shows how over 40 years Republicans played their long game first rigging the Supreme Court with corrupt christofascists, and then getting the racist decision they wanted.
Guests in the audience await the arrival of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence during the Federalist Society’s Executive Branch Review Conference at The Mayflower Hotel on April 25, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Drew Angerer / Getty
On June 29, the Supreme Court upheld a challenge to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina and put an end to race-conscious measures to overcome discrimination. The Federalist Society, an ultra-conservative legal organization, was the central force behind this decision. In immediate terms, the opinions that killed affirmative action were written by the six justices who are or have been members of the Federalist Society, the conservative majority on the court. More significantly, the decision was based on precedents that Federalist Society lawyers had created over the past 40 years.
Chief Justice Roberts, long an opponent of affirmative action, wrote the opinion for the court in which all the conservative justices joined. Justices Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh wrote concurring opinions to articulate their individual concerns. Collectively they rejected diversity in education as a permissible justification for […]
Paul M. Barrett and J. Grant Sims, - Center for Business and Human Rights - New York University
Stephan:
Like me I am sure you have heard the constant spewing of weaponized disinformation from christofascists claiming that they are being censored in a variety of ways on social media. It is a constant litany on misinformation channels and social media. Well, let’s look at some actual factual research. And what do we see, as this study reports? Why we see all of that is lies, the deliberate weaponization of misinformation. And, of course, this is why the recent court decision by a MAGAt judge blocking the government from to anything about this was so important to the Republicans (see the SR archive).
Conservatives commonly accuse the major social media companies of censoring the political right. In response to Twitter’s decision on January 8, 2021, to exclude him from the platform, then-President Donald Trump accused the company of “banning free speech” in coordination with “the Democrats and Radical Left.”
Two days earlier, Trump had included the ideological bias claim in an incendiary address to supporters, some of whom then participated in a riot inside the U.S. Capitol. “The radical left tries to blacklist you on social media,” Trump said in his speech. “They don’t let the message get out nearly as they should.”
This accusation—that social media platforms suppress conservatives— riles a Republican base that has long distrusted the mainstream media and is prone to seeing public events as being shaped by murky liberal plots. On a policy level, the bias claim serves as a basis for Republican attacks on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal law that protects platforms from liability associated with user posts and content moderation decisions.
But the claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form […]
Alex Henderson, Staff Writer - Raw Story / AlterNet
Stephan:
The people behind the christofascist Republicans recognize that their MAGAt base is inclined to conspiracies (see SR archive) and so they are laying track for a spectrum of such nonsense to manipulate the 2024 election. Here is an early report on this trend. My question is will the Democrats be able to make it clear to the American public about the good things they have done? They aren’t doing a very good job of it at the moment.
Christofascist Republican and Congressional clown Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia at the 2023 CPAC. Credit: Shutterstock.
Conspiracy theorists have a long history on the far right, from the John Birch Society during the 1950s and 1960s to the rise of “Infowars” founder Alex Jones in the late 1990s/early 2000s. But conservatives of the past were more likely to push back against them.
The late William F. Buckley excluded the Birchers from his National Review. Jones was shunned by the George W. Bush Republicans of the 2000s.
But Donald Trump’s presidency and the MAGA movement gave Jones and other conspiracy theorists much more prominence on the right, and conspiracy theories involving the Biden family are plentiful in right-wing media.
In a report published by The Guardian on July 10, journalist Nick Robins-Early describes a conspiracy theory that has been gaining ground in MAGA World: the claim that the Biden Administration is “attempting to silence conservative voices” on social media.
In Louisiana, Judge Terry Doughty (a Trump appointee) ruled that Biden officials cannot communicate […]
David Remnick, in my view is the best magazine editor in the country. Very smart, widely experienced, with good editorial judgment that has made The New Yorker one of the most important magazines in the country. I met him once in Moscow back in the 1980s, and listened to his clear wellbeing oriented values. And he is not easily intimidated. I think he has put together the best interview and commentary with RFkJr. He seems to have wellbeing in mind, but in his own words his anti-science, paranoid thinking make him a dangerously horrible choice for public office.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Credit: Mark Peterson / Redux
In November, 2007, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, appeared on ABC News for one of those soft-focus get-to-know-the-candidate segments. Obama admitted that, after he was at Harvard Law School for a while and felt “comfortable” among his hyper-ambitious classmates, he allowed himself to think that maybe he’d run for President someday. “Did you think to yourself, Barack, what kind of hubris is this?” the broadcaster Charlie Gibson said.
“I think if you don’t have enough self-awareness to see the element of megalomania involved in thinking you can be President, then you probably shouldn’t be President,” Obama said. “There’s a slight madness to thinking that you should be the leader of the free world.”
I was thinking about that moment last week, after finishing a long interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Kennedy is running for President as a Democrat. He is polling between eight and twenty-one per cent.
If there is a madness, slight or otherwise, in Kennedy’s […]
I increasingly think of the United States as an aged formerly heavily muscled action hero now gone to seed and in poor health. From the 1930s to the 1960s we created a middle class that was the envy of the world, built colleges that made us the technological leader of the world, and created an infrastructure of bridges, railroads, and interstate highways that were without equal. But then the maintenance that fostered wellbeing that made us a world leader ended, and instead we shifted our priorities to fostering the rise of the uber-rich and, today, all the triumphs of those 30 years have been left to decay and we are now, like the former action hero a country decayed and in ill-health. Nowhere is this clearer than in the scandal of a water system still using lead pipes, as this article describes.
A worker holds a section of the lead piping he is replacing with the copper pipe. Credit: Charles Krupa / AP
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND — Prandy Tavarez and his wife were expecting a baby when they bought a four-bedroom house in a well-kept neighborhood of century-old homes here. They got to work making it theirs, ripping off wallpaper, upgrading the electrical and replacing windows coated in paint that contained lead, a potent neurotoxin that can damage brain development in children.
That wasn’t the only lead. The pipe carrying water to their home was made of it, too. Providence’s tap water had had dangerous lead levels for years. So it wasn’t surprising in 2008 when a road crew came through and dug up the street to take out the pipe. Then they left part of it in the ground.
“They put on a Band-Aid,” Tavarez said.
Around the country, utilities have been leaving lead pipe in the ground even when it is easiest to remove during water main work. Worse, they have been removing sections, disturbing the pipe and leaving […]
